About Emotions

I think of emotions as if they are machine or assembly language, and consciousness as a higher level language that is self-aware. I took several computer programming courses in the early 1980s and so like to use that as a way to illustrate emotions. I believe that emotions are a primitive holdover and forerunner of the development of the conscious and subconscious thought- they are all on a spectrum. Emotion is less accurate than conscious thought, yet it expresses imperatives meaningful to those experiencing them- fear, love and hate are examples. Usually one has good cause to experience sudden emotions- they can recognize circumstances faster than rationalization sometimes.

I feel like emotions are something of a self-reflection event too. They are for-oneself, and something that one cannot communicate directly to others as one may language representing conscious thought. Philosophers have a criterion of solipsism- the belief that one can only really know one’s own mind exists, and what it experiences- anything else is contingent. That is a hard idea to be aware of in a social environment, yet technically that is accurate. Sartre wrote that God is the only one who could know one’s own mind and that of another as the other experiences it simultaneously (or at all). Emotion is a lesser primitive communication system occurring within one-self. Yet it is so powerful- I wonder what the origin is of that?

So pragmatically one has to accept the naive reality perspective on relationships. A woman can bring herself and bonding to a man. The right woman brings happiness. Actually I believe that scientists have shown some sort of bio-chemical bonding occurs to a certain degree as well. Emotionally one might enjoy emergent experiences perhaps, as time and a relationship move on. Soldiers and philosophers usually are better off being objective and rational rather than emotional, yet not perhaps, always. I would think that people find conscious fulfillment in another before emotional. I would not even know how to program or store emotional satisfaction in a mind, or know if that can be done. To what extent does emotion have a memory for-itself? Or do emotions just have their own governor different than a conscious mind’s?